


you make my heart shake.

by katarama



Series: leave this blue neighborhood. [1]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alcohol, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorder, Closeted Character, Clubbing, Frame Verse, Future Fic, Las Vegas, M/M, Mental Health Issues, No Bitty AU, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Drug Addiction, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 04:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10586022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katarama/pseuds/katarama
Summary: Jack is just trying not to see ghosts in the flashing of the lights, because he’s all too aware of where he is.  In Vegas, for one.  But he’s also all too aware of what these sorts of settings used to be like for him, the way it was easier to try when he had the pills down his throat and a warm boy at his side that eased his way through conversations like they came second-nature to him.  Jack keeps seeing a backwards black snapback or a flash of short blonde hair and a shiny watch when the lights are at their brightest, and it has him on edge, because one second he thinks he sees something, and the next it’s gone, and he’s left wondering if he’s dreaming up demons.If Kent could ever truly be considered a demon, even on the worst days.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone! This is gonna be a super long author's note, but there's some really important stuff in here, so bear with me.
> 
>  _What is this?_ This is the first fic in a 16-fic series that centers around Jack and Kent and their history and their future. It follows canon, with one major difference; Bitty decided not to go to Samwell. Each fic is named after and based around a song on the Deluxe version of Troye Sivan’s album Blue Neighborhood. The first two fics are chronological, because they’re in the fic’s current time (2018) in the frame of the story. Most of the fics in the series are told through flashbacks and time jumps, though, and the stories switch back and forth between Jack and Kent’s perspectives. 
> 
> _Any warnings?_ Each fic will be tagged with warnings specific to that fic, and if one fic in particular is too rough for you, as long as it isn’t the frame verse, you can theoretically skip it without losing the plot too much. I’ll tag which fics are in the frame. But here are some general warnings. Anxiety and depression are depicted pretty consistently throughout the series. Many of the fics have mentions of alcohol and anxiety medication use/abuse. The overdose is written as intentional. There are occasional mentions of sex from when the characters are 16-18 years old, which is legal in Canada and which I, therefore, won’t be tagging as underage. Jack and Kent are both closeted.
> 
> Also, Kent has BPD and has been in treatment for a number of years. While writing this, I had seen fics and headcanons with Kent having BPD, and I'd had some conversations with friends about it. This Kent took on a lot of those characteristics, especially related to intensity of emotion, impulsivity, and splitting/black and white thinking. Kent having BPD and/or undergoing treatment is not the focus of this fic, but because this is the way I wrote him, I wanted to warn for it, just in case. 
> 
>  
> 
> Finally, I’d like to send many thanks to Alex, Beth, Ellis, and Jo for being wonderful and cheering me on throughout this project. It was a two-month labor of love, and I hope you all enjoy it!

**January 2018**

 

Jack’s drink is cold in his hand, the condensation on his glass of tonic water getting his fingers wet as the ice melts.  He’s distractedly wiped his hands on his pants twice and somehow been surprised when they came back tinged blue both times.  He isn’t really used to wearing jeans out, especially not jeans this dark.  They feel tight on his thighs, which Jack suspects is the intended effect.  He didn’t pick them out.  Snowy did; he shoved them at Jack when Jack finally opened the door of the hotel room, Snowy slipping in a “you coming out tonight?” that wasn’t really a question.

Jack could have protested.  Most nights he does.  Most nights he’s tired down to the bone after playing, especially when they’re on the road.  Most nights he isn’t up for dealing with the noise and the flashing lights and the 2 AM cab rides back to the hotel.  He rarely drinks, anyway.  Tater and Snowy have chains of connections that always manage to get them a table at clubs, and while they spring for bottle service, Jack mostly sits at the booth and watches their stuff.

Tonight, though, Jack didn’t really have a choice from the start.  There’s the fact that they’re in Vegas, which meant Georgia issued warnings that probably inspired Tater more than anything.  There’s the fact that it was a tough game that ended up being a good one; Jack had a last-minute clutch shot to clinch their victory, and Marty got into a brawl that landed him in the sin bin and put a new shiner on his face.

And then there’s the fact that his team seems entirely unwilling to leave him alone after a game when the Aces are on the other side of the ice.

“We don’t expect you to drink,” Thirdy had reminded Jack when he swung by to make sure Jack was actually coming.  The fatherly tone in it made Jack wonder even more how Tater convinced Thirdy to go in on this plan.  Thirdy doesn’t have a lot of nights out these days, especially nights out in Vegas.

When Thirdy checked twice to make sure Jack was okay before finally leaving the club and heading back to the hotel to call it a night, Jack suspected he might know after all.  

Jack had reassured Thirdy that he would be fine and had let Thirdy out of the booth.  Now, Jack kind of wishes that he had left with him.  It’s only 12:15 AM, but he already has the beginnings of a headache creeping in.  He is incredibly sober and listening to Tater flirt loudly with a girl about ten feet away, which is a pretty painful combination.  He has three or four messages waiting in his inbox from Shitty, all asking if Jack is okay.  He messaged Shitty that he was out with the team, preempting future questions by sending immediately after that he wasn’t going to drink.  But he doesn’t know how to answer the question Shitty asked, or his team wouldn’t have needed to drag him out in the first place.

The team doesn’t know much.  They don’t know the big stuff.  But they know enough to see the way Jack’s face goes tight when they catch the commentator coverage leading up to their games against the Aces.  They know enough to see the way Jack cringes when they talk up Jack and Kent’s rivalry.  They see the way Jack’s fists clench when the sportscasters talk about the draft, their voices laced with that familiar patronizing tone as they share the history that they consider themselves qualified to tell.  Jack had to leave the room once when faced with the easy way they spooled out a, “shame Zimmermann couldn’t keep it together, or he might’ve given Parson a run for his money on that Calder,” and a, “if things had gone differently, it might’ve been Zimmermann out there with an Aces logo on his sweater,” and a “who knows, by this point a team could’ve hedged their bets and gone for both of them, I hear the Zimmermann-Parson no-look one-timer was in high demand back in the Q.”  

The team knows that Jack has been frank about the anxiety meds and about the alcohol and about the overdose and about the rehab, but still won’t talk to any of them about what exactly fractured with him and Kent Parson.  They don’t know that Jack is bi, and they don’t know that Jack was someone to Kent.  Is someone to Kent.  They see the looks Kent Parson gives Jack across the ice, and the effort Jack pours into not looking back.  But there are some things Jack keeps to himself, some things he doesn’t want circled around the locker room, because they shouldn’t matter anymore.

Shouldn’t being the operative word.

But he plays harder against the Aces, because if he can wear his body down, then there has to be a point in which even his brain has to follow, has to let him close his eyes and fall asleep instead of keeping him locked into thoughts he still doesn’t know how to dismiss.  If he’s focused on the puck and the ice and the rink, then he isn’t seeing what color Kent’s eyes look when Kent skates in his black Aces jersey, and he isn’t comparing Kent’s eyes to the color they were when Kent kissed Jack for the first time, or the color they were in the Memorial Cup photos Jack still has at the very beginning of his camera roll on his phone.  

He’s almost glad that Kent forces him to give those games everything he’s got, because it drives something competitive in him that keeps him from wanting to hide.

His team notices, of course.  He’s been with the Falconers a few seasons now.  They practice together so much that they know Jack’s game.  They know that it’s different when he’s facing off with Kent, and they may not know exactly what it means, but they know better than to leave Jack alone in a hotel room after that, and Jack should be grateful for that.

Mostly, he’s just tired.  He’s glad he has a team who gives a fuck about him and doesn’t want him to feel alone.  But he isn’t exactly _not_  alone, here, either.  Because, try as they might, Snowy and Tater aren’t going to hook him up with a puck bunny they met at a club.  He isn’t going to get drunk and want to go dance, because that wasn’t even something Ransom or Holster could coax him into, back when he didn’t have to worry quite as much about pictures appearing online.  He isn’t the life of the party, going around and talking to people and making friends with Vegas socialites, not even on the best days, and he especially isn’t after playing a grueling hockey game.  He’s just sitting there in the booth, guarding the bottles of vodka and the mixers and the ice.  He’s just staring at his phone as the Samwell chat pings and trying to figure out if any of it is something he needs to dredge up enough energy to respond to.

He’s just trying not to see ghosts in the flashing of the lights, because he’s all too aware of where he is.  In Vegas, for one.  But he’s also all too aware of what these sorts of settings used to be like for him, the way it was easier to try when he had the pills down his throat and a warm boy at his side that eased his way through conversations like they came second-nature to him.  Jack keeps seeing a backwards black snapback or a flash of short blonde hair and a shiny watch when the lights are at their brightest, and it has him on edge, because one second he thinks he sees something, and the next it’s gone, and he’s left wondering if he’s dreaming up demons.  

If Kent could ever truly be considered a demon, even on the worst days.

But Jack keeps talking himself down.  He keeps taking another sip of his tonic water, and then another, until his hands are wet and then his hands are blue.  He gives himself another half an hour before he can call it a night, and he settles down in the knowledge that he’s almost done, that he’s almost out of Vegas and almost done with this roadie and almost back home to Providence to do the thinking too much in the privacy of his apartment.  Snowy drops down into the booth for some vodka cranberries and gets Jack involved in a conversation about the rule change for goalie pants, and Jack starts to finally let his guard down.

It’s in that moment that Jack turns his head and feels his insides go liquid.

There’s a man standing there, though Jack will never not think of him, at least in some small measure, as the boy he knew.  The man has blonde hair and a backwards black snapback and a watch that reflects the flashing lights with the force of its shine, even from where it rests nearly hidden in the pocket the man has his hand stuffed into.  Jack can’t see the color of his eyes, but that was never much of an identifier in the first place.  The identifier is the cowlick sticking out from under the snapback’s strap.  Or the freckles dusting his nose that Jack is just too far away to see.  Or the crooked, cocky grin that means trouble nine times out of ten, the one that hasn’t found its way onto the man’s face yet.

Or the way his eyes meet Jack’s with an intensity that doesn’t leave room for any sort of uncertainty at all about who he’s staring at in the VIP suite of a club in Las Vegas.

“Fuck off, Parson,” Snowy says a little too loudly when his eyes follow Jack’s line of sight, after slowly realizing that Jack wasn’t absorbing his words.  “We’re in a douchebag free zone here.”

“Funny you’re here, then,” Kent says easily, instinctively, just barely loud enough over the music.  He starts coming closer, and Jack doesn’t have to think for very long at all to know every single way that this could go bad.  His brain flashes with the images of a fist in Kent’s face and all of them getting ejected from the club, the press in Vegas and Providence chewing them up and spitting them out, spreading smear stories about Jack falling into his _old ways_.  They’re both faces of expansion club franchises who aren’t looking for bad press, and while Snowy could take the hit, Kent may not be able to spin it off, and Jack definitely couldn’t.

Jack can feel Snowy starting to move, as if he expects Jack to just let him out of the booth and get at Kent.  Jack holds his ground.

“We didn’t know you’d be here,” Jack tells Kent.  “We’re adults.  We can be in the same club without anyone starting a fight.”  The last bit is directed at Snowy just as much as it is Kent.  Snowy talks shit, but is less likely to actually throw down, and Jack is suddenly intensely glad that Tater is still distracted by a girl.

“I didn’t come over to start a fight,” Kent says.  

“Then you can fuck off,” Snowy says, ever the diplomat.

“Then why did you come over?” Jack asks, instead.

Kent’s hands are still shoved in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched.  He looks small; smaller than Jack remembers him being, before, at least.  While Kent keeps it from his face well, Jack can tell that Kent is unsure, and it strikes Jack that maybe this wasn’t actually planned, or even maybe entirely thought through.

“To talk?” Kent asks, his shoulders shrugging slightly.  “Not in front of your emo flashback friend, but.  Look, can we just go around back for like.  Fuck, just, like, two minutes.”

Jack knows two things as soon as the words leave Kent’s mouth.

He knows that this is a terrible idea.  His brain defaults there automatically, zooms straight to the worst case situation.  There’s nothing that will keep it from going any differently than the last two times they tried to talk, when Kent visited Jack at Samwell.  There’s no reason that this talk would be smoother than the last time Kent opened his mouth, when his words were sharp knives in all the vulnerable places Jack had let Kent see.  There’s no reason that this talk would go any less disastrously than the time before that, when Kent showed up on the doorstep of the Haus, just after winning the Stanley Cup, and Jack was filled with such an unsettling mix of emotions, jealousy and hurt and want, that Jack had lashed out himself.  It’s been a few years since they’ve tried, and Jack would like to think he’s a better person than he was that day, but he isn’t sure he is, where Kent’s concerned.

He also knows, without even having to weigh the pros and cons in his head, that he’ll follow Kent out, weaving their way through the smoke and the crowd and out back to the alley.  It’s probably a failing on his part, probably some sort of self-destructive impulse.  Following someone who has hurt him and who he has hurt, putting himself in the position to get too close to something he’s still too afraid to touch.  But it’s been a long time since since the draft, and it’s been a few years since Samwell.  And it’s Kent; possibly a humbler Kent than the one who showed up with a smirk on his face and a “Didja miss me?” or the Kent who drove to Samwell on an impulse and a prayer and seemed shocked when Jack was conflicted.  It’s a Kent that looks so starkly familiar to Jack, small and uncertain and almost defensive by default, no traces of pretentiousness aside from that stupid fucking snapback and that stupid fucking watch.  

“Fine,” Jack says.  He can see Snowy’s argument forming just from the way he puffs up his chest, but trying to convince Jack that this is a terrible idea isn’t an effective strategy when Jack already knows it’s a terrible idea and is choosing to do it anyway.  “You’ve got two minutes.”

“That’s all I need,” Kent says.

The scariest part is that Jack believes him.

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr [here](http://polyamorousparson.tumblr.com).


End file.
